LFF Dispatch #4: Land of Hope and Gory - Horror Shorts from the UK, France, and Canada

I didn't arrive in London in time to cover the first screening of this horror-themed program–or programme, which looks classier–but it plays again on Oct 18, the last day of the festival. Lucy Luscombe's Meatmylk is the only film the LFF didn't include in their digital library, but I wrote about all others. Of the six films, the LFF has offered a content advisory for four regarding scenes of graphic violence or injury, nudity, and sex. Most horror fans wouldn't find any of these films too hard to handle, but the squeamish may want to take note. In alphabetical order.

ALL YOURS
(Sophia Di Martino, UK, 2025, 8 mins)

All Yours begins with a bit of foreshadowing as the lovely Audrey (Loki's Sophia Di Martino), a lonely homemaker, peels and eats a hard-boiled egg. That night, she finds herself scratching at her neck. The next morning, the scratching continues until she pulls a thin layer of skin off her entire body. 

It's nothing like the self-mutilation of Marina de Van's unsettling In My Skin; it’s more like a snake doing what snakes do. Audrey looks the same afterward, but now a disgusting pile of skin covers her bathroom floor. She tries to tell her best friend, except Mora (Lady's Sian Clifford) only wants to talk about herself, so Audrey heads to the kitchen and gets to work. 

What starts out as a disturbing development culminates in a metaphor for liberation, enhanced by filmmaker Di Martino's charming performance.

FISHBRAIN
(Max Vanderspuy, UK
2026, 22 mins)

Creature feature meets folk horror in Max Vanderspuy's Fishbrain. 

Ori (Dune: Prophecy's Chloe Lea), a young woman in a fishing village, dropped out of school to look after her surly grandfather, Jeb (Red Riding's John Henshaw), after her grandmother died. 

Something has been ailing the local fish population, but she swears she's serving him the good stuff. Once she's had enough of his shit, though, she turns to the bad stuff, but it has no effect on the old bastard. As their relationship continues to devolve, the toxic fish exert a more profound effect on her. 

Vanderspuy shot the film in low light with frequent cutaways to slimy fish with squishy guts. After Tony, the seafood-centric film about Anthony Bourdain, I found myself craving fish and chips. After Fishbrain, I'd rather not look at a fish ever again, so I can't say it didn't make an impression.

THE LAST SNOW / La Dernière Neige
(Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus, France, 2025, 19 mins)  

A night-skiing enthusiast gets separated from his companions in writer/director Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus's survivalist thriller The Last Snow. 

With extra time on his hands, Guillaume (Guillaume Pottier) decides to take a chair lift up the mountain to watch a ski ceremony. He rides with Isabelle (Compartment No. Six's Dinara Drukarova), a mysterious Russian woman who tells him about a deadly bear attack and explains how the resort handles times of light snow. She also expresses an intense fear of heights, so I'm not exactly sure what she's doing on a chairlift in the first place. 

Then they catch glimpses of alarming sights and sounds below them suggesting that an unhinged creature is on the loose, so Guillaume does all he can to persuade Isabelle to jump off the chair to run away, but she's as stubborn as hell, and things don't end especially well. 

The actors are convincingly scared shitless and Bouquet-Populus builds tension effectively, but The Last Snow doesn't really go anywhere, other than to confirm that the tallest of tall tales can turn out to be true. And that night skiing probably isn't the best idea.   

MAN EATING PUSSY 
(Lee Lawson, Canada, 2026, 12 minutes)

Oh, those frisky Canadians! 

When I received an email, shortly before the festival, about a film called "Man Eating Pussy," I thought there must have been a mistake. Was it spam? Was it pornography? No and no, as it turns out. 

Actor and director Grace Glowicki, who first came to my attention in Booger and last graced Seattle cinemas with Dead Lover, plays a sex worker with a vagina for a face. In real life, even women would probably find that pretty horrible, but the terminally ill man who meets with her for a date seems more surprised than horrified, and the makeup effects are truly impressive. 

I won't say more, other than that Glowicki and Julian Richings are pretty great and that the title has a different meaning than you might expect. This short would make for a particularly provocative pairing with Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth, a black comedy about a young woman (Jess Weixler) with teeth where one would not normally expect--or want--to find them. 

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG CHARLOTTE
(Shir Ariya, UK, 2026, 13 mins) 

Charlotte (Liv Jekyll) and Werther (Fabian Bevan) are longtime friends. Until recently, she was in a relationship and he was single, but after four years, her boyfriend dumps her, and she's devastated. Werther steps in to offer support, but he's really hoping to consummate a longtime crush. 

Charlie is lonely and vulnerable enough to give in, but when he tries to perform, he can't. Then, he spots some potency pills in her medicine cabinet, and they're able to finish what they started. Afterward she makes it clear that this was a one-off, but it's too late: he's confessed his feelings, and the pills worked too well, leading to a darkly comic conclusion. 

Although a man could have made this film, I knew a woman did, because Werther believes that Charlie's boyfriend is the only thing standing in his way--rather than that she's just not into him (though she could have let him down a little easier). Werther isn't necessarily a bad guy, but he's dangerously naïve, except instead of turning the object of affection into a victim, like in Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End or Curry Barker's Obsession, Shir Ariya, a Thai filmmaker based in the UK, ensures that the man gets his comeuppance. Though the makeup effects could have been more effective, The Sorrows of Young Charlotte offers a welcome corrective to the films in which a woman must pay for failing to live up to a man's expectations. 

Above: a 52-second glimpse into Man Eating Pussy.

Land of Hope and Gory, an 89-min program, screens at LFF on Sun, Oct 18, 8pm at BFI Southbank, Screen NFT2. The screening is sold out, but tickets may be available at the door. Images from Film Affinity (All Yours poster), the IMDb (Fishbrain poster), the BIFFF (The Last Snow poster), and British Council UK Films Database (Liv Jekyll in The Sorrows of Young Charlotte).  

LFF Dispatch #3: The Mother-Child Bond Proves Frightful in Finnish Horror Nightborn

NIGHTBORN / Yön Lapsi 

(Hanna Bergholm, Finland/Lithuania/France/UK, 2026, 92 mins)

"Fuck London."--a sentiment a father will come to regret 

A baby is bound to be challenging for any new parents, except the little fellow in Hannah Bergholm's Nightborn, winner of the Cheval Noir--the top prize--at this year's Fantasia International Film Festival, isn't just different, but mysterious and inexplicable, almost like a creature from another planet.

In Bergholm's first feature, Hatching, a preteen gymnast with a tightly-wound mother cares for an egg that hatches into a strange and terrifying creature. She leaned on practical effects, like puppetry and animatronics, for her tactile take on suburban conformity and toxic parenting.

Right: Just a girl and her egg in 2022's Hatching

For her followup, again cowritten with Ilja Rautsi, she switches to English, for the most part, while exploring the mother-child bond from an entirely different angle. She also shifts from the suburbs to the Finnish countryside where newlyweds Jon (Harry Potter's Rupert Grint), a Brit, and Saga (Seidi Haarla) have arrived to start a family in her ancestral home. 

The cottage may have been beautiful and sturdy in her late grandmother's day, but her mother (Pirkko Saisio), an academic, had no interest in it, and now the floorboards are literally rotting. She and Jon aren't discouraged, though. They'll fix it up and raise three kids, exactly as they had planned. 

After exploring the house, they venture into the woods, where Jon notices that some of the trees have troll-like characteristics and seem to want to trip him up. He's a bit creeped out, but Saga finds it all very literally stimulating, and the next time Bergholm catches up with them, she's in labor. 

Saga gives birth in a bloody spurt, after which the nurses spirit the baby away, and she doesn't understand why. Once she's had her rest, she meets the hairy, cranky, but otherwise healthy child. Bergholm doesn't show its face, so we have to take it on faith that it isn't monstrous. She and Jon proceed to name the little tyke Christian, which seems ironic, but Jon is a vicar's son.  

After the birth, Saga's body starts to change in subtle and disturbing ways, and no matter what she does, Christian responds more positively to Jon. The same is true of her mother, sister, and in-laws, too, though not by much. 

After several painful biting encounters while nursing, Saga comes to find that her offspring prefers blood to milk, but no one believes her. In fact, her nearest and dearest believe that she's the problem, especially her non-nurturing mother and resentful sister (Pamela Tola). Others find the aggressive fellow altogether off-putting, suggesting that this isn't a textbook case of post-partum depression or even psychosis, but whenever Saga tries to do non-mommy things, it cries out for her. (She thinks of Christian as more of an "it" than a "he.) She feels like she can't win, because she can't. 

It's only when Saga gives the kid what he wants, that things change. It's just that Christian, whose name she spontaneously changes to Kuura (Finnish for "Frost") without consulting Jon, doesn't want normal things, driving a wedge between her and her normie husband as she finally bonds with the weird little being. Her mother and sister claim that she was once a weird little being, too, something Bergholm never explains, other than to suggest that Saga more closely resembles her grandmother.

Suffice to say, Saga's sister was the easy one, whereas Saga was also a difficult child. There are elements of Rosemary's Baby to the scenario, not least when Jon segues from supportive to judgmental, but the baby is neither demonic nor vampiric. I'm not sure exactly how to define it other than as a troll-like manifestation of Saga's fears about motherhood as much as the creature in Hatching was a manifestation of Tinja's repressed anger.

Rupert Grint, who next appears in Ebenezer, is quite good, even if it seems as if he aged into a middle-aged man overnight, since I've seen little of his work since the Ron Weasley days, but that's on me, though he has signed on to play the adult Ron in Broadway's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. 

Seidi Haarla, however, who first impressed me in Juho Kuosmanen's terrific 2021 two-hander Compartment No. 6, goes for broke in a physically and emotionally demanding role. I couldn't say whether she drew from experience as the mother of three. Or whether Grint, the father of two, did the same.

If anything, Hannah Bergholm's film reminded me of Lynne Ramsay's Die My Darling in that Haarla, like Jennifer Lawrence's unhinged mother, ends up exposed in every way, snarling and crawling on the floor and doing everything possible to connect with her child. I was also reminded of Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in that Kuura never stops crying and whining, and Bergholm waits until the very end to show his face in full. 

While Hatching struck me as the more original proposition, Nightborn is well worth a look for anyone interested in Finnish cinema, folk horror, or spooky films about strange kids--and their freaked-out mothers--though pregnant people should think twice before subjecting themselves to Saga's...saga.  

   

Nightborn, which is now on Shudder in the States, premieres at LIFF on Oct 9 at Vue West End and plays again on Oct 10 at Prince Charles Cinema and Oct 14 at BFI Southbank, though tickets only remain available for Oct 9. Images from ICF via Moviejawn (Seidi Haarla), CSFD.SK (Haarla and Rupert Grint), Eye for Film (Haarla and Grint), and FirstShowing.Net (Haarla).

LFF Dispatch #2: NYC Duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen Conjure Up the Past as a Living Thing in Their Directorial Debut Chronovisor

CHRONOVISOR
(Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, USA, 2026, 99 minutes)

Sailin' away on the crest of a wave / It's like magic / Oh, rollin' and ridin' and slippin' and slidin' / It's magic.--ELO, "Livin’ Thing" (1976) 

Béatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier, a French professor of behavioral science), a Columbia University researcher and philosophy professor, sets out to solve the mystery of the Chronovisor, a machine that can reportedly record the past, in this text-intensive metaphysical mystery from Cosmic Salon, aka Maryland/NYC filmmaking duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen.

At the New York Society Library (actually a library at Johns Hopkins), her home away from home, Béatrice pores over books and periodicals and listens to audio recordings and at her apartment, she watches videos. She's often the only one in the library late at night, illuminated by the green glow of a banker's lamp (Leo Zhang shot the film in warm, soft-edged 16mm and excerpts from Holst's The Planets provide the stratospheric score). 

Left: Kevin Walker and 

Jack Auen

In the course of her research, she finds that Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk born in 1925, claims that he created the device with the aid of 12 physicists. If this was a documentary, we would assume he was a charlatan. It isn't, though the vast majority of the names, claims, and facts presented are real. 

But that doesn't mean Ernetti was on the up and up. Béatrice finds, for instance, an explanation for his most startling photograph: a closeup on a crucified Christ wearing an expression that recalls Maria Falconetti in Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. According to Ernetti, the released photo was a facsimile, but that doesn't explain what happened to the original.

Further, Ernetti never explained how The Chronovisor works before he went missing, so the mystery isn't just about its inner workings, but about what happened to the device and to its inventor. Since then, conspiracy theories have proliferated, accompanied by Elvis-like sightings. Considering that the monk would be 101 in 2026, it seems unlikely that he he's still alive. 

Béatrice reaches out to Ernetti's relatives and associates in hopes that they can provide some insight. In the process, she unlocks a treasure trove of additional materials. 

Sellier, who resembles German actress Nina Hoss, isn't really an actress, and she doesn't really act. Instead, she listens, watches, and reads. As she does, Walker and Auen illuminate relevant text passages, sometimes translating them from the original French or Italian, languages Béatrice speaks. They also gave the subtitles a slightly aged look, a nice touch exemplifying their holistic approach. 

In its early stages, the directors depict Béatrice having drinks with colleagues and speaking at a lectern before an academic audience, but she seems most comfortable, possibly even happiest, alone in the dark swimming in words. For better or for worse, I found that relatable. 

Then she travels to Italy and transitions from observer to participant.

Though Chronovisor is an experimental film, it's easy to figure out what's going on at any given time. In Italy, however, Walker and Auen create painterly images that prove hard to decipher. Rough, colored outlines appear on a black background. Sometimes they're splotchy and mottled. At other times, they look like red and blue 3D images. This section, which concludes the film, does and does not solve the mystery. In that sense, I was reminded of Ivan Zulueta's sole feature Arrebato, Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep, and Laura Citarella's Trenque Lauquen. In all three films, the protagonists lose themselves in the mysteries they're trying to solve.

For the most part, though, Walker and Auen's directorial debut, which follows several shorts, is its own beast. 

The biggest question, for me, wasn't whether the device did what Ernetti said it did, but whether it was a good idea in the first place. After all, he came to believe it was dangerous, leading the Vatican to get involved, which is never a good thing, but could have been worse if governments got ahold of it.

It also occurred to me that since cameras didn't exist thousands of years ago, it was up to artists to tell us about their times, and maybe that's how it's meant to be, not least when artists have fewer practical reasons to do so now when they can just pick up a camera phone or, worse yet, turn to Claude or ChatGPT, and when it's harder than ever to make a living from art.

Chronovisor, however, is art. No doubt about it.

Stream Walker and Auen's 2021 short film, "Marblehead," here.

Chronovisor plays Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, through Tues, Oct 6. It premieres in London at LFF on Oct 9 at BFI Southbank and plays again on Oct 11 at ICA. Both screenings are sold out, though some tickets should be available at the door. Images from Grasshopper via InReview Online (film still), Filmmaker - Substack (Walker and Auen), Woodstock Film Festival (the face of Jesus, supposedly), and Reactor Mag (Anne Laure Sellier).

LIFF Dispatch #1: The 2026 BFI London Film Festival - 70 Years Old and Still Kicking

It's been years since I've attended the BFI London Film Festival, so this isn't my first, but it's hard to resist an anniversary, and this year, LFF turns 70. 

By contrast, the Seattle International Film Festival, my hometown festival, turned 50 in 2024, the Toronto International Film Festival turned 50 in 2025, the New York Film Festival--which coincides with LFF--turned 60 in 2022, and the Cucalorus Film Festival, for which I've been serving on the narrative judging committee, turned 30 in 2024. 

Compared to Cannes and Venice, LFF is relatively young, but of the festivals with which I'm most familiar, it's the oldest. If you haven't heard much about it, though, that's because it may have many high-profile films, but it doesn't have the highest-profile premieres. Instead, though it's a competitive festival--unlike NYFF--it's more about programming that culls from the best of the competitive festivals in a world-class city with ample opportunities to see actors and directors in person, whether at screenings, events, or as part of the Screen Talk series. 

This year's jury presidents include Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI), Amir El-Masry (Giant), Sandhya Suri (Santosh), and Helen Simmons (100 Nights of Hero). The Official Competition includes judges Julie La Bassiere (DDA Global) and Mariano Llinás (the 808-minute La Flor), who will be at LFF with the 324-minute documentary Life of Jorge Luis Borges. Julia Loktev's 370-minute My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile will also be at LFF, though I doubt I'll have time for either. Jury award winners will be announced on Oct 18.

I don't arrive in London until Oct 8, so I won't be able to make it to the Oct 7 Talks with Sofia Coppola or Andrew Scott either, though I'm hoping to make it to Eleanor Coppola's documentary Making Marie Antoinette, which was completed by Sofia Coppola, and Simon Stone's Elsinore, the opening night film, in which Scott plays actor Ian Charleson, who gave his final performance in Richard Eyre's Hamlet before succumbing to complications from AIDS eight weeks later (I've been watching Netflix's Ripley to prepare).

Though LFF excludes the word "International," this year's festival includes 251 films from 88 countries, including 33 world premieres. Of those premieres, the most notable, from a PNW perspective, is Travis Knight's adaptation of writer/ musician Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis's 2011 fantasy novel, Wildwood, produced by Oregon animation studio Laika (Kelly Reichardt adapted stories from Colin's sister, Maile Meloy, into Certain Women). 

This year's lineup also includes 109 female filmmakers or 43%, which is estimable, though 49% of SIFF 2026's filmmakers identified as female or nonbinary. I don't know if LFF counts female and nonbinary filmmakers in the same way, but I'm always happy to root for the home team when I can.

 

Though most of LFF's lineup includes films that haven't opened in the  States, even if they've played other festivals, there are exceptions. If anything, I was surprised to find that Boots Riley's I Love Boosters hadn't opened in the UK. It opened SIFF in May, and I recommend it, unless you're allergic to bright colors, absurdist humor, or collective action. Riley came to Seattle with the film, but not with any of the cast members. Naomi Ackie, on the other hand, will be at LFF, though I don't know if she'll be at all three screenings. She's also doing a Screen Talk I hope to attend on Oct 10. 

More: Lance Oppenheim's Primetime opened in the States on Sept 25; I wrote about it for The Stranger. (His Elizabeth Holmes documentary with Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything, is also making the festival rounds, though it isn't playing LFF.) Hanna Bergholm's folk horror Nighborn, another new-to-the-UK title, opened in July and is now streaming on Shudder. I'll have more to say about Bergholm's second feature in a subsequent post. 

There a few other films that fit this category, but there's something about seeing a film, any film, in a country other than your own that enhances or alters the experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out.

LFF 2026 runs from Oct 7-18 at venues across London. Please see the festival site for more information. Poster images: the BFI and Kinoafisha 

It's Punks Versus Skinheads in Jeremy Saulnier's Fast and Bloody Green Room

A decade ago, A24 released Green Room. Somewhere along the way, my review for The Stranger got truncated, so here's the full version. Slightly revised from the original text.

GREEN ROOM

(Jeremy Saulnier, USA, 2015, 95 minutes) 

There's a moment in many horror movies when the director breaks from the main story to show how the monster got so monstrous. Then they return to the action, but the stakes are raised, because the bad guy isn't as faceless as before. Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) has no time for that jive. Bad guys are bad guys. The goal is to escape their clutches by any means possible. 

And so it goes for the punk band, the Ain't Rights, that ends up playing a gig at a white supremacist compound in Oregon--shades of Malheur--out of sheer desperation. The group, which includes Anton Yelchin (Star Trek's Chekov) and Alia Shawkat (Kelly Reichardt's Oregon-set Night Moves), raises a convincing racket, but they don't help their cause when they open their set with Dead Kennedys' evergreen 1981 anthem "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." 

Then they witness a murder and the neo-Nazis (led by a chilly Patrick Stewart, the cast's other Star Trek veteran) give them the "Hotel California" treatment, i.e. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." From that point forward, it's punks versus skinheads set to a propulsive soundtrack of Bad Brains, Slayer, and Poison Idea.

In contrast with Tony Kaye's American History X and Shane Meadows' This Is England, Saulnier's skins play more like cold-hearted businessmen than pathetic fucks. The fun is in witnessing the ingenious ways the punks--including two turncoats--fight back using the crudest tools available. 

It's fast, bloody, and when you least expect it: hilarious.

Postscript: A24 released Green Room on April 15, 2016. A little over a month later, Anton Yelchin was dead at 27 due to a vehicle malfunction (his family settled with the manufacturer out of court). A documentary about his life, Love Antosha, appeared in 2019, but I'm still not ready to watch it.

Left: Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre

On a  happier note, Saulnier followed Green Room with the Netflix movies Hold the Dark and Rebel Ridge, which won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. It was one of the year's best and introduced the world to Aaron Pierre, who first came to my attention in Barry Jenkins' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. Pierre can now be seen on HBO's Lanterns opposite Kyle Chandler.

Also, I had no idea who Callum Turner was in 2016, and didn't mention him in my review (I didn't mention Imogen Poots or Macon Blair either). This year, Turner appeared in several features, including the inimitable Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada. He's also reportedly in the running as the next James Bond. And, oh yeah, he married pop superstar Dua Lipa in May.

Green Room plays Northwest Film Forum for one night only on Wed, Oct 14, as part of Seattle Film Critics Society's SFCS at 10 series. After the screening, Matt Oakes (Silver Screen Riot) will be conducting a live virtual interview with Jeremy Saulnier. We're working on other surprises, as well. 

Click here for tickets and more information. We'll be following with David Eggers' The VVitch on Nov 19 and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight on Dec 9.  

Images from A24 by way of Vox (Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat, and Anton Yelchin) and The Guardian (Patrick Stewart with Brent Werzner, Mason Knight, Samuel Summer, and Colton Ruscheinsky) and The Associated Press (Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre / credit: AP Photo / Chris Pizzello).  

Begotten: E. Elias Merhige’s Debut Rises from the Dead to Freak You Out All Over Again

BEGOTTEN 

(E. Elias Merhige, USA, 1989, 72 minutes) 

In its abstraction, E. Elias Merhige's directorial debut, Begotten, plays like a Gothic goulash of silent film fragments that have been moldering and degrading for decades. 

 

The combination of rephotographed 16mm B&W reversal film, neutral-density filtration, musique concrète, and eerie sound effects conjures up a powerful sense of unease, enhanced by the lack of dialogue or intertitles. 

The story involves three characters: God, Mother Earth, and the Son of Earth, all played by members of Merhige's stage company Theatreofmaterial. Through an open door, he begins with a masked, white-garbed God (Brian Salzburg) on a chair in a corner, spattered with deep black blood as he slices away at his midsection with a straight razor. As he slashes, God convulses while what sounds like a clock submerged in water ticks away on the soundtrack (other sounds arranged and composed by Evan Albam include thunder, buzzing flies and crickets, heartbeats, and persistent moans). 

Gradually, entrails fall to the floor. Even after God takes a final breath and slumps to the side, the blood continues to flow until Mother Earth (Donna Dempsey), wearing a diaphanous dress with a mask covering her eyes, emerges from underneath the voluminous fabric and glides out of the room. 

 

After spinning around, head tilted toward the sky, she returns to God where she proceeds to impregnate herself. It isn't necrophilia in the usual sense, but she takes what she needs to conceive. Most every image in the film is too nebulous to cause offense. 

Merhige then shifts to a rocky hillside on which her naked, fully-grown, mud-encrusted son (Stephen Charles Barry), aka Flesh on Bone, writhes while nomads in threadbare robes watch impassively before carting him away on a makeshift stretcher to inflict more pain before dragging him to the top of the hill. Merhige probably wouldn't appreciate a comparison to The Passion of the Christ, but it definitely crossed my mind, since Mel Gibson's blood-drenched drama practically exults in Jesus's protracted, excruciating ordeal. 

After the son is left to die, the mother returns to drag him away by an umbilical cord-like lead, but she doesn't get far before pants-free nomads arrive to torture her. As they drag away her lifeless body, the son can only watch helplessly. Then again, if she had dragged him much further, she might have strangled him. There's beauty in this film, but there's no love or tenderness. It simply doesn't exist in the pitiless world Merhige has created. 

By the end, the bodies have been returned to the Earth. Considering that I watched this film back-to-back with The Life We Leave, it occurred to me that Merhige was ahead of the curve when it comes to terramation. He even ends with buds emerging from the soil as the nomads go about their business without a thought for the mulched-up victims of their violence. 

 

Begotten is a singular experience, though it reminds me of things I would rather not think about, like Marilyn Manson. Merhige, a one-time collaborator, helped to shape Manson's image through videos and tour production. Then again, Trent Reznor was drawing from similar influences, like death-obsessed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, and look at the two guys now: Reznor has gone from strength to strength, particularly in his film-scoring partnership with Atticus Ross, while Manson is now better known for the horrific abuse he inflicted on several women, including actress Evan Rachel Wood. 

Merhige, I'm sure, couldn't have known what was to come, and the two last worked together 30 years ago, but I did my due diligence and watched the videos for "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid." In the first, Manson plays a dirtbag fascist ranting from a stage in front of an adoring crowd. There's no trace of Merhige's personality, but the latter is a different story, since it plays like Begotten in miniature, not least because it includes footage from the feature. Even the crackling sound design is similar. 

The director followed up with two studio pictures, 2000's Oscar-nominated horror satire Shadow of the Vampire and 2004's psychological thriller Suspect Zero, before making two short Begotten sequels, 2006's "Din of Celestial Birds" and 2022's "Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera," and a final video for Interpol's "The Heinrich Maneuver." Since then, he's worked mostly in theater, though he supervised the 4K restoration of his first feature and has been working on a Leonardo DiCaprio-produced survival drama.

 

Though I hadn't yet seen Begotten in 2000, Merhige's reputation preceded him, and I made certain to catch his followup when I attended the Toronto International Film Festival that year, especially because he was in attendance with Willem Dafoe, who plays actor Max Schreck, John Malkovich, who plays Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and Catherine McCormack, who plays actress Greta Schröder. I found the film, which has all the humor Begotten lacks, pretty delightful. 

Merhige's first and last film for Lionsgate presents a highly fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the making of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece with Malkovich as a win-at-all-costs director and Dafoe in go-for-broke mode as a real-life, bloodsucking Count Orlock. No doubt Merhige had great fun recreating B&W sequences from the original film. If Begotten wasn't to my taste, Vampire definitely was, and I wish he had made more films like it. 

To his credit, though, Begotten has garnered plenty of admirers. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who found the film "grotesquely pretentious," was not one of them, but the great cultural critic Susan Sontag was fully on board. At the very least, it's part of an experimental, late-20th-century lineage that includes such notable works as Bill Morrison's Decasia, Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.  

Love or loathe it, Begotten is the kind of film every cinephile should see at least once. And for the Goth or Goth-adjacent: it should be required viewing.

9/30/26 update: J. Hoberman has had somewhat of a change of heart.

 

Begotten opens at New York's Film Forum on Oct 2; sneak preview on Oct 1 with the director in attendance. It opens in Seattle at Northwest Film Forum on Oct 23. Begotten images (featuring Donna Dempsey and Stephen Charles Barry) from Kino Lorber and Shadow of the Vampire image (Willem Dafoe and Catherine McCormack) from Lionsgate by way of Anti-Film School.  

Sweaty Guys Who Smell Like Salmon: Dakota Fanning vs Alaskan Men in The Sun Never Sets

THE SUN NEVER SETS

(Joe Swanberg, USA, 2026, 104 mins) 

The Sun Never Sets isn't really about Alaska, but Joe Swanberg set his latest feature, his first in six years, in my home state. 

I'm not sure why, because it isn't the easiest place to shoot a feature, independent or otherwise. The summer days are so long, the winter days are so short--and cold and icy--and everything is more expensive. 

A film's budget will only balloon the more a director flies in actors, crew members, and equipment. I'm sure he used as many local resources as  possible, but those are limited, so I would imagine it was still a challenge. Then again, maybe that's just what he needed to shake up his routine.    

For these and other reasons, most films and TV shows set in Alaska, like Northern Exposure or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, are filmed elsewhere, usually Canada or Washington, and I can always tell, since I grew up there. 

Right: David Strathairn as a sweaty guy who probably smells like salmon in John Sayles' Limbo

Maybe most people can't tell, but it's always bothered me, so John Sayles' Limbo, a low-key 1999 thriller, and Sean Penn's 2007 Jon Krakauer adaptation Into the Wild felt like outliers. Granted, I wasn't completely surprised that Sayles and Penn would film on location, but Swanberg, the one-time Chicago King of Mumblecore? No, I did not see that coming. 

I've long had a fraught relationship with the director’s work. Granted, I haven't seen all 20 features, plus streaming projects, but I've seen enough. Drinking Buddies (2013), however, marked a shift from the solipsistic, navel-gazey films that had come before. 

In it, Olivia Wilde and Swanberg muse Jake Johnson play straight people who forge a Platonic friendship, and that's the gist of it. It isn't as common as you might think, since most on-screen friendships comprise women with women and men with men, not counting the gay best friend, since there's no possibility of romance–unless one of the straight people realizes they aren't so straight after all. The Sun Never Sets is a return to the loose-limbed relationship dramas with which Swanberg made his name, albeit on a slightly bigger scale and with a more experienced director at the helm. 

Dakota Fanning, most recently of Netflix's Ripley, plays Wendy, a 31-year-old heavy-machine operator whose married friends are starting to have kids. She can't relate, because it isn't where she's at, at least not yet. (Swanberg had two kids with filmmaker Kris Rey, from whom he is now divorced.) 

Left: a more glammed-up Dakota Fanning in Ripley with Johnny Flynn

Wendy isn't single, though. For the past two years, she's been seeing Jack (Johnson, recently of Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed), a middle-aged hedge fund manager and part-time girls basketball coach with two kids of his own. His ex-wife (Anna Konkle) has moved on to a new partner (played by Swanberg) and new kid, but the director avoids soap operatics, since Jack doesn't resent his ex and the kids don't resent his girlfriend.

Wendy believes she's ready to settle down with a guy who doesn't want to remarry or have more kids, but Jack is skeptical, since she has interests, like camping and houseboats, that don't jibe with his. He's not wrong that she isn't ready, but his demand that they separate for six months, so that she can explore life as an unencumbered individual--a sort of Rumspringa for non-Amish adults--feels controlling, since he doesn't give her a choice, though he swears he'll be waiting for her if she decides to return. 

If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't, because one-sided ultimatums don't bode well for lasting relationships, not least when her friends take his side. She also has the option of not seeing anyone and biding her time for six months, but she reenters the dating pool instead, both awkwardly and reluctantly.

Then one night, she runs into Chuck (Gotham's Cory Michael Smith), an old flame who has returned to town as a pilot for an air taxi company, and their chemistry is instant, even after three years apart (though Fanning and Johnson have an amiable rapport, there's more sexual heat between her and Smith). Jack didn't think she would hook up with another guy so soon, but she does, and he doesn't take it well. I can see why she might want to have fun while they're on a break, but Chuck immediately starts talking marriage, and she doesn't seem to find that premature. 

Fanning is very good, and this is mostly her film, as much as Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles was mostly sister Elle's show, but Swanberg treats her like a yo-yo. That's the point, but as the men increase the pressure, and she bounces between the two, both look like bad bets. 

Alaska may offer its share of "sweaty guys who smell like salmon," but that's no reason to settle. The way Jack tells her he loves her over and over again comes to feel aggressive, especially since she rarely says she loves him back. I don't doubt that she does, but not quite as passionately. 

Tired of being alone, Jack takes up with Sara (Karley Sciortino from Swanberg's Netflix series Easy and co-writer of Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex), and the two couples even run into each other at her favorite watering hole for trivia night, but Swanberg doesn't play any of this for laughs, despite the way some viewers--though not me--have characterized the film as a rom-com. That tense evening, which leads to a series of shouting and laughing matches, serves as a catalyst, but not necessarily in the way I would have expected. I was certain the film would end in one very particular way, but it doesn't, and that's to Swanberg's credit, since these characters all have some work to do.

Though reviews have been all over the map, I liked the film more than not, and would recommend Richard Brody's unusual review, in which he explains how what might play like weaknesses in another film become strengths in this one. The Sun Never Sets can be repetitive, some actors handle the improvised dialogue better than others, and there's more mid-tempo singer-songwriter material on the soundtrack than any one film can use, some performed by Joe's brother James. None of it is bad, necessarily, and I'm always happy to hear former Seattleities La Luz, but it lends the film an adult contemporary sheen that works against the prickliness of the scenario.

I could also nitpick Swanberg's representation of Anchorage, nicely shot in 35mm by Eon Mora, except he's not far off the mark. Not everyone works as a pilot or a fisherman; there are lawyers and accountants, too, but that's never been Swanberg's milieu, so it makes sense that he would focus on less-corporate types, some of whom also paint or, like Wendy, work with wood. And it was fun to spot familiar locations, like Chilkoot Charlie's, Kaladi Brothers Coffee, and the Sunshine Plaza (above), where my mom worked as a pre-sentence reporter for the Alaska State Department of Corrections.  

I wouldn't want to overpraise The Sun Never Sets, but it deserves better than it's gotten, and may well serve as the most accurate cinematic depiction of my hometown to date. I mean, the sky really is pearlescent white, not blue or grey, more often than not. It's the damnest thing, and probably has a lot to do with Cook Inlet, the body of water bordering the city, but when you see a film set in and around Anchorage featuring the bluest of blue skies, you can bet it was probably shot somewhere else.

The Sun Never Sets only played in Seattle on Sept 10, but it's playing IFC Center in New York through Sept 17. It's also playing Anchorage's Cinemark Century and Beartooth Theatre Pub, among other venues. Images: The Independent Film Company via Mark Reviews Movies (Dakota Fanning), Far Out Magazine (Fanning and Cory Michael Smith), 1A (Fanning and Jake Johnson), and the IMDb (David Strathairn and Fanning and Flynn).